Deaf As a Ghost

Last weekend, while listening to the radio on a long drive, I remarked that I was "deaf as a post." Except someone thought I said "deaf as a ghost" and didn't understand the expression. And yeah, that wouldn't make sense, because the notion of a deaf ghost runs entirely counter to what is historically considered perhaps the only advantage of ghost-hood: omniscience. I'm thinking chiefly about the joys of finally being able to eavesdrop on any conversation and getting to watch people shower, but it also reminds me of a recurring dream another friend of mine used to have after losing her boyfriend of eight years to cancer. After Sean died he would come to Jessie in dreams and she'd get to see his face again. The problem was, whenever he'd try to talk it was either as if there was a wall of plasma between them that would muffle the sound, or else he just couldn't get any words out at all. Jessie half-believed it was actually Sean and not a figment, that they were really trying to communicate but the strict stratification of worlds wouldn't permit it, even in a dream.
I guess I half-believe that too. Partly because my visit with my vegetative mother last week has me feeling that it's only fair we should get some sort of final chance to say unsaid things, or at least ask what it's like in there — in The Beyond, or in my mom's head. If people who are gone can't talk it's only fair to assume that they can listen, right? So for this reason I believe it was Real Sean in Jessie's dreams, and I also believe it because of this, one of my favorite poems ever.

By Marie Howe, from "What the Living Do":

THE PROMISE

In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.

His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

as we do, in time.
And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff,

and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass though. We go on and on

and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we’d pass

across the kitchen when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,

in a crowded room, something important, and can’t.

Burial - Ghost Hardware (div share)

Blonde Redhead - Maddening Cloud (div share)